Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

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> has a steeper learning curve

Does it?

I think Markdown "won" for a variety of reasons (Github? Slack? Pandoc?). I don't think AsciiDoc is so much more complicated than Markdown that people can't learn it quickly.

The reason Markdown is now standard is that people like standardized things. They want to use the same syntax in their chatroom, forum, ad-hoc readme filed, and doc comments in code. And if they're already using one markup language, why learn another? Why not use the same one everywhere?

It's not that AsciiDoc is complicated in general, it's that it's ever so slightly too rigid for "ad-hoc" markup in places like Discord and Hacker News. Thus people end up learning Markdown because it really is the best fit for those platforms, and then people don't want to learn another markup language, and so you get a snowball effect of implementation support and popularity. And thus we are stuck with Markdown everywhere.

This isn't necessarily a bad outcome. But that's how I see it. I still want AsciiDoc to gain more traction in technical writing!

Markdown is appealing because you can read a markdown document without knowing markdown. It's intended to make sense on it's own.

I agree with this. Reddit and Discord both use markdown and I've been using it for ages without ever knowing it's called Markdown.

I just thought it's a neat trick you can apply italics by underscore and make text stand out with back ticks around.

Even least technical people using bold/italics/indent on WhatsApp are using markdown in a way.

The bold/italics/indent syntax predates markdown. Markdown is great but the “*” / “_” / “>” were all in use before it (see Usenet emails for example)

Well, that’s why Markdown was popular. It took existing conventions, codified them, and more importantly, crested a tool to convert them to HTML.

At its core, Markdown was little more than a perl script that converted a human readable doc written using many online conventions into HTML.

Others realized this was a brilliant idea and created their own supersets and/or alternatives of markdown. That’s why there’s so many flavors of markdown with little tweaks.

And that’s why Markdown is popular. Because it took advantage of convention built out of years of trial and error.

The same is largely true of asciidoc. There are cases where you do kind of need to understand asciidoc, but mostly for features where in markdown you have to reach for the escape hatch of inline html.

I think it has a higher learning curve if you include everything in the language, because asciidoc has so many more features than markdown. But if you limit asciidoc to the subset that is comparable to markdown, I don't think it has a higher learning curve.

In fact, most of markdown is compatible with asciidoc. The markdown syntax for headings, monospace, quotes, lists, code blocks, and section breaks all work.

I think you are on the right track but may be over estimating the "average" internet user capabilities?

I had to migrate a couple of projects from awful, big ridden, wysiwyg editors to markdown and it's a huge challenge. Many people expect everything to work just as Ms Office/word does. Anything behaving in any way different than their benchmark is wrong..

Now, going from such a mindset to Markdown is a huge endeavour. You need to re-educate your user. Many will never appreciate the raw, code-like nature of markdown and will dread it the entire time they have to endure it.

I really don’t get the push for markdown etc over WYSIWYG for everyday people. The _very first_ web browser was also an GUI editor, and then you already had proper rich text editors since at least the Macintosh. Why should users not expect something as basic as formatting text to follow UI conventions established through what’s now forty-odd years of use by billions or people? It is akin to asking them not to complain when swapping a steering wheel for something like the tiller on 1880s cars.

Markdown works better in a VCS than WYSIWYG formats.

Technical users are an important user segment as well, especially those used to advanced text editors and IDEs. They don't have the patience to conform to the changing and often poorly thought-through user interfaces of text processors and want the flexibility to use more powerful tools if required.

Do it like JIRA: give them both. People used to GUIs can use the WYSIWYG interface, and power users can use Markdown.

CKEditor also gives that option – where you can type in Markdown if you prefer that over the rich-text UI. So both sides can be happy.

> The reason Markdown is now standard is that people like standardized things.

Can you think of anything less standardized than Markdown?

Without answering the question, it was the wrong answer, unambiguously and definitively.

No, I don’t have to have the correct, best answer to get this.

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